Despite its gloomy, oppressive atmosphere, the original Dead Space marked the beginning of a bold new era for publisher Electronic Arts, ditching its unpopular rhetoric of rehashes and year-on-year sequels in favour of original new IP. Although the third-person adventure horror genre wasn't exactly treading new ground –the massively-successful Resident Evil 4 acted as a template for the game - Dead Space was filled with all kinds of neat tricks, such as zero gravity exploration and an emphasis on minimal on-screen information. Its terrific sound design also made it one of the most tense and frightening experiences in years.

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With so many clever touches, where do you take the sequel? Set three years after engineer Isaac Clarke left the USG Ishimura behind, the Necromorph infestation has caught up with him in a whole new setting, a vast colony on one of Saturn's moons called The Sprawl. So what has happened this time, then? Executive producer Steve Papoutsis isn't keen to give the game away: "The Sprawl is a giant space city - think about things you'd see in a city, and there's a good chance you might encounter those in Dead Space 2. I'm really sensitive to giving out spoilers, though, so I don't want to give anything else away other than that."

Whatever the player might come across in the game, we know for sure that it's filled with all kinds of fancy new toys to play with. The surprisingly strategic dismemberment combat returns with some notable improvements, such as a Javelin Gun that skewers an enemy with a dart and pins them to a wall, so that hacking off limbs is that little bit easier. Additionally, the alternate fire causes the dart to explode or electrocute your foe, and can be stuck to walls and floors as energy-packed remote mines to defend against advancing threats.

The tool worked wonders in the first area of our preview, which saw Isaac don a sharper, more angular suit and look out upon a sky-high city basked in a warm, orange glow, before heading inside to more familiar claustrophobic territory. A wide corridor filled with columns was the perfect playground for the Stalkers, who work in packs to flank the player, and most resemble humans than any Necromorpth we've seen previously. The Javelin was perfect at stringing up these adversaries for easy kills, while a new floor-dwelling enemy type - the exploding Crawler - could be kept at bay through the enemy fields created by stray darts. Oh, and those discarded alien limbs? You can now use the Kenesis ability to throw them like spears if you run out of ammo.

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The following area saw a period of downtime by navigating stretches of eerie corridor and dispatching some rather inert dangers. Cysts are floor and wall-hugging creatures that fire explosive pods if you stray too close, requiring a deft eye and ear if you want to avoid taking damage. Although they will primarily dwell in empty corridors to trip up sprinting players, Papoutsis paints a scene of a room filled with Cysts which are ready to blow like organic champagne bottles, but can be delayed through Stasis so as to take out advancing waves of enemies. You can even grab its explosive pod with Kenesis and spit it across the room as an explosive grenade. As simple as the Cyst is, it easily had the most application for mayhem.

Round the corner, a locked door plays on Isaacs's engineer vocation by having the player engage in a timed button minigame (still from that minimalist third-person perspective) which knocks off health for slow responses. As Papoutsis took the helm it was difficult to see exactly how these work, but similar tasks will be present throughout the whole adventure. Opening the door paves the way for a mining area, populated by tall yellow cranes and glowing green walls, and shows off some of the more dynamic and sprawling level design with walkways that can take you to multiple levels within the same zone, perhaps hinting that there'll be more grandiose locations in the sequel rather than the tight, linear stretches of corridor we're used to.

Fast forwarding to a later part of the game, we see Isaac's tour of the city continue through an office complex, with dangling lights and filing cabinets that can be blown apart and thrown as blunt weapons. As fun as it is to watch the revamped physics do its stuff, a single stray bullet that catches a window will create a vacuum that can suck out everything in the room - Isaac included. Papoutsis was keen to prove that this can be used in combat, allowing you to effectively clear a room with just two bullets (the second round is used to catch an emergency button above the window). Again, more of these environmental interactions are promised, but have yet to be detailed.

In fact, a lot of the game's content is still under wraps and will be teased over the coming year, with big reveals set for E3 and Gamescom. When asked for more specific pacing and story details from Papoutsis, it was clear that the plot won't just be an afterthought, but a core focus for the entire game. "I'll say that we have a story, we need to tell that story, and we're not going to do anything to compromise the integrity of that story, so we're going to see how it paces out when it's all put together," he explained. This is no more evident than in the fact that Issac can now remove his helmet and talk in this game, and will strive to act on his own accord instead of blindly following the instructions of his team - the polar opposite of what we saw in the original.

A trend for many sequels this console generation is the addition of multiplayer, which Dead Space 2 will most certainly include. Aside from the promise that you can "strategically dismember your friends", how it will carve its own niche in the online space is anyone's guess. But going off Papoutsis's comments, it's clear that the adventure will have a tighter direction and an overall goal to achieve rather than broken up and repetitive go-to objectives from the first game, and will offer a lot more of that satisfying and rather sadistic combat that made the first game such a success.

Dead Space 2 will be released in Spring 2011 for Xbox 360, PS3 and PC.